Silent Comedy - Paul Merton
| 
Traces the evolution of silent comedy through the 1900s and considers the works of the genre's greatest exponents - Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and others - showing not only how each
developed in the course of their career but also the extent to which they influenced each other.
|
| Faces of World War One - Max Arthur
| 
Charting the BEA's entry into warfare in 1914, this work tells the story in words and pictures of the army's life through the five years of slaughter and suffering. It conveys not only the heroism, but also the universal
horror, futility, humour and boredom of warfare.
|
|
 |
The Mitfords - Charlotte Mosley
| 
The never-before published letters of the legendary Mitford sisters, alive with wit, affection, tragedy and gossip: a charismatic history of the century's signal events played out in the lives of a controversial and uniquely
gifted family.
|
| A History of Modern Britain - Andrew Marr
| 
A History of Modern Britain confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions, and rival idealisms, of a new Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan age came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. |
|
|
Simon Schama - Rough Crossings
| 
Set against the backdrop of the American Revolution and its aftermath, Rough Crossings is the astonishing epic of the struggle for freedom by thousands of slaves who believed that their future as free men and women was bound up with staying British, not becoming American.
The decision to offer liberty to slaves who defected to the British side began in military strategy, but it unleashed a great mass movement of Afro-Americans who clung to the sentimental notion of British freedom even when they knew that the emancipators were very far from being saints in the matter of slavery.
|
| Mao The Unknown Story - Jung Chang
|  Jung Chang's Wild Swans was an extraordinary-bestseller throughout the world, selling more than 10 million copies and reaching a wider readership than any other book about China. Now she and her husband Jon Halliday have written a groundbreaking biography of Mao Tse-tung. |
|
|
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
|  In the bestselling, prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the world of science both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe. Now in this glorious new illustrated edition, everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization is even more vividly brought to life with stunning full-colour photographs, drawings, portraits and cartoons. |
| Eddystone - The Finger of Light by Mike Palmer
|  The finger of light
This is the definitive history of the world's most definitive lighthouse. Fourteen miles off the port of Plymouth, lies what the captain of the Mayflower described as `this wicked reef of twenty-three rust-red granite rocks ... great ragged stones around which the sea continuously eddies, a great danger to all ships hereabouts'. Before the seventeenth century, no one had considered it possible to put a warning light in such an exposed and dangerous position, but in 1698, Henry Winstanley completed the first lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks. It was a wooden structure, and after one of the most violent storms in history, in November 1703, no trace of it remained. |
|
|
Chaucer - Peter Ackroyd
|  Chaucer is the first of a new series of short
biographies, which I am writing with the
purpose of bringing to life some of the
most important men and women in the
history of the world. |
| Trafalgar - Roy Adkins
|  `It is necessary for us to be masters of the sea for six hours only, and England will have ceased to exist' Napoleon Bonaparte, June 1805
Just four months later something very different was to happen: Britain, under Nelson, mastered the sea for the six hours of the Battle of Trafalgar, annihilating her French and Spanish opponents. This resounding victory paved the way towards Napoleon's defeat, a decade later, at Waterloo. But at Trafalgar, Britain lost her greatest maritime commander. |
|
|
The Edwardians - Roy Hattersley
|  Edwardian Britain has often been described as a golden sunlit afternoon - personified by its genial and self-indulgent King. In fact, modern Britain was born during the reign of Edward VII, when politics, science, literature and the arts were turned upside down.
In Parliament the peers were crushed for the first time since Magna Carta. Irish nationalists and suffragettes took politics out on to the streets. Home Rule and Votes for Women were delayed, not precipitated, by the First World War. |
| TOMMY By Richard Holmes
|  The First World War is deeply dug into the consciousness of the British. The images it conjures up are of blood, barbed wire, shell-holes filled with dead bodies; of subalterns with wispy moustaches who never had the chance to grow old; of soldiers with faces vacant from shell-shock; of great aunts who never married.
|
|
|
Alison Weir "Mary, Queen of Scots"
|  "And the Murder of Lord Darnley"
Darnley's Murder ultimately led to Mary's ruin. One factor was the convenient discovery of a box of documents - the nororious Casket Letters - that her enemies claimed were proof of her guilt. But Mary was never allowed to see the letters, and they disappeared in 1584. The question of their authenticity has haunted historians ever since. |
| Patricia Cornwell "Portrait of a killer"
|  By using techniques unknown in the late Victorian era, Patricia Cornwell has exposed Sickert as the author of the infamous Ripper letters to the Metropilitan Police. |
|
|
